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ENCIT 2020
18th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
A COMPARATIVE NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF THE AVAILABLE POWER BETWEEN REGULAR AND IRREGULAR WAVES: CASE STUDY OF AN OSCILLATING WATER COLUMN CONVERTER IN RIO GRANDE COAST, BRAZIL
Submission Author:
Gabriel Tavares , RS , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Gabriel Tavares, Rafael Maciel, Elizaldo dos Santos, Mateus das Neves Gomes, Luiz Alberto Oliveira Rocha, Bianca Machado, Phelype Oleinik, Liércio Isoldi
Presenter: Rafael Maciel
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2020.CIT20-0304
Abstract
Due to the current high cost of production, wave energy is a rather underutilized resource. In order to assess the feasibility and efficiency of installing devices that convert sea wave energy into electrical energy, realistic sea state simulations are of paramount importance. In this context, the present work brings a comparison of the available power in an Oscillating Water Column (OWC) converter device, when subjected to irregular waves (reproducing a realistic sea state) and regular waves (representative of this realistic sea state). The fluid dynamics simulations, performed in the Fluent software, used velocity profiles from the coast of the state of Rio Grande do Sul as boundary conditions for wave generation; these velocity profiles data were obtained from a simulated sea state using the TOMAWAC model. The results show that the average power available in the OWC device is 5 W, obtained with realistic irregular waves. The regular waves representative of the sea state, on the other hand, tend to underestimate the available power by 0.78 times, if calculated based on the peak wave period of the spectrum; and overestimate it by 2.73 times if the mean wave period is adopted for the generation of regular waves. Based on these results, it can be inferred that the peak period would be a more suitable estimator to represent an irregular sea state using regular waves.
Keywords
sea state, Frequency Spectrum, irregular waves, Numerical Modeling
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